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Red Bull Stratos

"How do you create the world's largest content marketing event when there's no dry run?"

On October the 14th 2012 Red Bull sent Felix Baumgartner to the edge of space. When he got there, he jumped out. By the time he landed somewhere in New Mexico he'd broken four records and become the first human to break the sound barrier without being in an aircraft.

We beamed the whole thing around the world, and in the process created the biggest livestream in the history of the internet.

Project Summary

Science + fun = brilliant

For Red Bull this was about more than just watching a guy fall out of space. They wanted to redefine their brand as a serious engineering force, always pushing the boundaries of possibility. The digital experience had to be fun, but it also had to represent the incredible amount of mental and physical effort that went into Stratos.

We mixed interviews, videos and blog posts with a quick game that gave visitors the chance to predict Felix's eventual landing site, for the chance to win a £12,000 mission watch.

Getting it right first time

Felix wasn't about to go up again if the site crashed mid-jump, so we had to have absolute confidence that everything would work without a hitch, no matter how much traffic got thrown at it. Our tech team worked tirelessly to make sure the solution was absolutely bulletproof, implementing some heavy duty testing and collaborating closely with Red Bull and their other agencies to make sure everything worked perfectly.

The online event of the decade

In the end Stratos attracted even more attention than we predicted. The site had 22 million visitors on jump day, and 8 million people simultaneously watched the livestream of the jump on YouTube, making it the biggest livestream ever. There were 3.1 million tweets about Stratos on the day of the jump and it accounted for more than half of all the trending topics on Twitter.